Daniel Palmer - Helpless

Jill scampered back to her feet and made fists with her hands. “Just leave us alone!” she screamed.

“Is Coach going to be your prom date, Lindsey?” Mandy asked.

“You don’t know anything,” Lindsey said.

“Your parents are divorced, isn’t that right?” Clair addressed Lindsey. “So is the coach like a father figure to you? A daddy replacement?” Clair kept the tone of her voice overly empathetic, which only put more sting in her sarcasm.

“You don’t even know what you’re talking about,” Lindsey retorted.

The witches formed a tight circle around the pair. Lindsey and Jill eyed each other and without words agreed that they would fight, not flee.

Thankfully, it didn’t come to that. Merle Gornick, Lindsey’s chemistry teacher, emerged from around the corner. “Don’t you girls have someplace you’re supposed to be?” she asked.

“Yes, Mrs. Gornick,” the witches said in unison. Gretchen stopped and turned, mouthing the words, “Say hi to Daddy,” as clearly as if she’d spoken them aloud. Merle must have guessed the other three were the aggressors, because she left Jill and Lindsey to gather up their things. She followed close behind the three girls, and when they reached the end of the hallway, they all disappeared around a corner.

Lindsey helped Jill put on her backpack. Both girls were breathing hard from the adrenaline rush.

“Can we talk?” Lindsey said to Jill.

Jill shrugged. “Sure. I guess.”

“I didn’t do this. I never had an affair with your dad. God, that’s so gross to even think about.”

This time, Jill seemed more open to listening. A good sign, Lindsey thought.

“Well then, why did the police confiscate your computer? Why did Fidelius Charm send out another batch of messages about you and my dad?”

“For the same reason that people think you’re Fidelius Charm,” Lindsey said.

“They what? That’s ridiculous,” Jill snapped.

“So is the idea of sleeping with your dad,” Lindsey said. “You’ve got to believe me, Jill. I swear to you it’s true. I’ve never done anything like that. I’d never.”

Jill sighed. “Look, is that FBI lady still hanging around?”

Lindsey’s insides went cold. It had been hard enough to sit through the mandatory assembly with Agent Lorraine Miles at the podium. She knew her pictures were probably the real reason the agent had come back to Shilo to address the students. Her mother had been in a rage ever since that embarrassing episode. And now with the police confiscating her computer, Facebook rumors escalating, she and her mother weren’t even on speaking terms. Apparently, her mother, like the witches, believed that Lindsey and the coach were having an affair. Lindsey’s stomach had been in knots for the entire hour of that assembly. She’d have skipped out if she could, but attendance was mandatory.

What could Jill want with Agent Miles? she wondered.

“I think so. Why?” Lindsey asked.

“You say you didn’t write those blog posts. Well, she knows about computers. Maybe she can help explain who did.”

“Would you believe me if she can?” Lindsey asked.

Again Jill shrugged. “Maybe. I think so,” she said. “We used to be on the same team. Before all this, I mean.”

“So?”

“So, maybe it’s time we get on the same team again,” said Jill.

Rainy heard a knock on the open door of Principal Lester Osborne’s office just as she was gathering up her things to leave. Two girls entered. Rainy was delighted to see that one of them was Lindsey Wells. She glanced over at the other girl and recognized her from a picture in Murphy’s police report as Coach Hawkins’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Jill.

Rainy’s pulse jumped. She had wanted to dig deeper into the Coach Hawkins case, but aside from identifying other girls from Mann’s unusual text image collection, she didn’t have any jurisdiction, let alone reason to investigate. Perhaps Lindsey was going to change all that.

“Hi. Are you still talking to students? Answering questions, I mean,” Lindsey said in an uncertain voice.

“Of course. Of course I am,” Rainy replied, her pulse still hammering away.

Rainy didn’t know what information, if any, Lindsey had shared with Jill about the sexting incident and its connection to Coach Hawkins. Rainy suspected that Lindsey had willingly shared her pictures with the coach, but, of course, that was only her theory and not yet an established fact.

“Let the evidence take you there,” Tomlinson always said.

Whatever the truth, Rainy knew to keep her knowledge of Lindsey’s naked pictures a secret between them. Lindsey didn’t seem to be here to rehash that, anyway. She had a fresh urgency. “Do you girls want to sit down?” Rainy asked.

Lindsey gave her head a quick shake no. “If it’s all right with you, we’d rather stand.”

Both girls shuffled on their feet, and neither would make eye contact with Rainy.

“Okay. Then I’ll stand with you,” Rainy offered. “So, can you tell me your names?”

Rainy looked at Lindsey, her way of communicating that their secret was safe with her.

“Sure, I’m Lindsey Wells.”

Rainy nodded, then looked to Jill. “And you are?” she asked.

“My name is Jill,” the sweet-voiced girl answered. “Jill Hawkins.”

Rainy moved out from behind Principal Osborne’s steel desk. She wanted no barriers between herself and the girls.

The girls leaned their lithe bodies against the concrete wall, looking to Rainy like crookedly hung paintings. Their expressions simultaneously conveyed boredom, nervousness, indifference, and concern.

Teenagers.

“What is it you want to talk about?” Rainy asked.

The girls glanced at each other, then at Rainy, but neither replied. Do you want to tell me why you sent Coach Hawkins your picture? she silently asked Lindsey. Rainy gripped the edge of the desk hard enough to make her fingers ache. “Girls, do you have something to ask me?” Rainy said again. Her investigator’s mind swirled through the many possibilities and connections.

Lindsey broke free from her perch and took a cautious step forward. “Well, in that assembly you were talking about things not being like they seem on the Internet. That story you told about chatting with a boy, but it’s not really a boy. It’s a man.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, I’m just wondering, um… How does somebody make it look like you were doing something on the Internet that you weren’t doing?”

Rainy bit her lower lip. She could guess what Lindsey might be getting at.

“Well, that depends. Can you be more specific?” Easy, Rainy. Easy.

Jill let out an exasperated sigh, as though anticipating how long this was going to take without her intervention. Unlike Lindsey, Jill kept her shoulders rooted against the wall and her arms folded tightly against her chest. “Look, the police think Lindsey wrote these blog posts on Tumblr.com about my dad,” Jill said. “They confiscated her computer.”

“And that’s what you wanted to talk to me about?” Rainy asked. Her heartbeat shifted into fifth gear from fourth.

“I want to know if you can do that,” Jill said. “Lindsey says she didn’t write any blog posts, she doesn’t even have a Tumblr.com account, but the police are saying they can trace the posts back to her home computer. How is that even possible?”

“Well, they’d do it through IP addresses,” Rainy explained. “There are logs that your Internet service provider keeps. We can match those logs up and use it to pinpoint an address.”

Jill’s expression contorted in a way suggestive of someone having eaten something unpleasant. Rainy glanced to Lindsey. “Lindsey is a minor,” Rainy said, “and her identity is legally protected.”